The Island of the Colorblind

As we walked slowly among the stones, I remembered another graveyard, also by the sea, which I had visited in up-island Martha’s Vineyard. It was a very old one, going back to the end of the seventeenth century, and there I also saw the same names again and again. In Martha’s Vineyard, this was a graveyard of the congenitally deaf; here in Umatac, it was a graveyard of the lytico-bodig.

When I visited Martha’s Vineyard, there were no longer any deaf people left – the last had died in 1952 – and with this, the strange deaf culture which had been such a part of the island’s history and community for more than two hundred years had come to an end, as such isolates do. So it was with Fuur, the little Danish island of the colorblind; so, most probably, it will be with Pingelap; and so, perhaps, it will be with Guam – odd genetic anomalies, swirls, transients, given a brief possibility, existence, by the nature of islands and isolation. But islands open up, people die or intermarry; genetic attenuation sets in, and the condition disappears. The life of such a genetic disease in an isolate tends to be six or eight generations, two hundred years perhaps, and then it vanishes, as do its memories and traces, lost in the ongoing stream of time.

Rota

When I was five, our garden in London was full of ferns, a great jungle of them rising high above my head (though these were all uprooted at the start of the Second World War to make room for Jerusalem artichokes, which we were encouraged to grow for the war effort). My mother and a favorite aunt adored gardening, and were botanically inclined, and some of my earliest memories are of seeing them working side by side in the garden, often pausing to look at the young fronds, the baby fiddle-heads, with great tenderness and delight. The memory of these ferns and of a quiet, idyllic botanizing became associated for me with the sense of childhood, of innocence, of a time before the war.

One of my mother’s heroines, Marie Stopes (a lecturer in fossil botany before she turned to crusading for contraception), had written a book called Ancient Plants, which excited me strangely.[74] For it was here, when she spoke of ‘the seven ages’ of plant life, that I got my first glimpse of deep time, of the millions of years, the hundreds of millions, which separated the most ancient plants from our own. ‘The human mind,’ Stopes wrote, ‘cannot comprehend the significance of vast numbers, of immense space, or of aeons of time’; but her book, illustrating the enormous range of plants which had once lived on the earth – the vast majority long extinct – gave me my first intimation of such eons.[75] I would gaze at the book for hours, skipping over the flowering plants and going straight to the earliest ones – ginkgos, cycads, ferns, lycopods, horsetails. Their very names held magic for me: Bennettitales, Sphenophyllales, I would say to myself, and the words would repeat themselves internally, like a spell, like a mantra.

During the war years, my aunt was headmistress of a school in Cheshire, a ‘fresh-air school,’ as it was called, in the depths of Delamere Forest. It was she who first showed me living horsetails in the woods, growing a foot or two high in the wet ground by the sides of streams. She had me feel their stiff, jointed stems, and told me that they were among the most ancient of living plants – and that their ancestors had grown to gigantic size, forming dense thickets of huge, bamboolike trees, twice as tall as the trees which now surrounded us. They had once covered the earth, hundreds of millions of years ago, when giant amphibians ploshed through the primordial swamps. She would show me how the horsetails were anchored by a network of roots, the pliant rhizomes which sent out runners to each stalk.[76]

Then she would find tiny lycopods to show me – club mosses or tassel ferns with their scaly leaves; these too, she told me, once took the form of immensely tall trees, more than a hundred feet high, with huge scaly trunks supporting tasselled foliage, and cones at their summits. At night I dreamed of these silent, towering giant horsetails and club mosses, the peaceful, swampy landscapes of 350 million years ago, a Paleozoic Eden – and I would wake with a sense of exhilaration, and loss.